Bill Rammell: I pay tribute to my hon. Friend's commitment in working with her local college. Part of the way in which we face up to the skills challenge that she has outlined is through the Train to Gain initiative. The capital project involving a new further and higher education centre, which she has strongly supported, is going through the approvals process. I strongly welcome her support for the right of high-quality, high-performing further education colleges to be able to award their own foundation degrees. There will be a very robust quality assurance system. In order to face up to the significant skills challenges that we face, we need as much flexibility and innovation in the system as possible, and this measure will certainly help.

Bob Blizzard: I know that my hon. Friend is familiar with Lowestoft college, which has four centres of vocational excellence, worked with more than 550 employers last year and has 288 apprentices. The college wholeheartedly welcomes the Leitch report and wants to be part of inspiring people as well as providing training, but it questions whether, with Train to Gain in its infancy, we can get to a fully demand-led system as soon as 2010.

Alan Johnson: My hon. Friend is an engineer and takes a great interest in these issues. We already have more than 300,000 businesses engaged with schools and helping to give some aptitude for working in industry. On the diploma, we will now have for the first time in this country the mixed vocational and academic course—providing a mix of theoretical and practical knowledge—that many other countries in Europe and around the world have had for many years. I agree with my hon. Friend about the importance of involving businesses. We have had a tremendous amount of interest in developing the diplomas, because they are industry driven, through the sector skills councils. There can be no complaint about the enthusiasm and involvement of industries throughout the country.

Tony Baldry: I thank the Secretary of State for that answer. Is he aware that towns such as Banbury and Bicester need a skills centre—a one-stop location where employers and those who want to acquire skills can get information on initiatives such as the post-16 diplomas, Train to Gain, apprenticeships and adult skills training in general? The vast majority of businesses on the M40 corridor are small or medium-sized employers. They want a highly skilled work force and to compete in the world, but they need to be able to get targeted information on how they can link in to all the various Government initiatives.

Alan Johnson: The hon. Gentleman is right, but the exciting development has been Train to Gain; I refer Members to Lord Leitch's report. We are using descriptions that the public might not understand, but the idea behind Train to Gain is to assist small businesses, which is where a particular problem lies in that they do not have the time to access lots of volumes of information in order to find out how to solve their skills problems. Under Train to Gain, we have trained brokers who meet small businesses to discuss their skills needs and then return with a skills package. That means that small businesses do not need to chase all over town to find the necessary information. Train to Gain is in its early stages, but it has been hugely successful. One of the most important of Lord Leitch's recommendations is that all level 2 and level 3 provision should go through Train to Gain.

Law Officers Advice

Andrew Robathan: This is very different from the relationship between a private client and his solicitor. Has the Solicitor-General managed to take the time to discuss the matter with his predecessor, the right hon. and learned Member for Camberwell and Peckham (Ms Harman), whose thinking is exactly the opposite of his? In the current climate, is it not vitally important that the Government be open about what has been said and about the legal advice that has been given on various issues, not least the war in Iraq?

Keith Vaz: Let me help my hon. and learned Friend. It is a settled precedent that the advice of the Attorney-General should be confidential. The Minister of State, Department for Constitutional Affairs, my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Camberwell and Peckham(Ms Harman), who is a former deputy to the Attorney-General, has said completely the opposite. Is she not bound by collective responsibility on the matter? Bearing in mind that it is Valentine's day next week, on 14 February, will the Solicitor-General act as Cupid and patch up this problem between the Attorney-General and his former deputy?

Theresa May: Given the interchange that we just heard in questions to the Solicitor-General, may I help the Leader of the House by suggesting that he arrange a debate on collective responsibility, in which Ministers could learn to understand what being part of the same team is supposed to mean?
	I note that the Leader of the House has not given us a full two weeks' business. He will have noticed that there is considerable interest in the debate on the unprecedented preferential voting system that he is introducing on House of Lords reform. The press report that the debate might be held on 27 February. Will the Leader of the House confirm the date of that debate?
	Before Christmas, the Leader of the House recognised the strength of feeling in the calls for a debate on Iraq. There is similar feeling for a debate on Afghanistan, particularly given the issues of troop deployment and resources and the Taliban threats reported today. May we therefore have a debate in Government time on Afghanistan?
	Following the announcement by the hon. Member for Morley and Rothwell (Colin Challen) that he would not contest the next general election, despite earlier assurances to the contrary, we learned this week from the Chancellor's climate change adviser, Sir Nicholas Stern, that the Chancellor had appointed the hon. Gentleman to work with Sir Nicholas. Will the Leader of the House clarify the terms on which the hon. Gentleman was appointed by the Chancellor and what he will do in his new role and assure us that no other promise has been made of which the House, or perhaps another place, should be aware?
	The Select Committee on the Treasury recommended that the date of the Budget be given two months in advance. We are now less than two months from the Easter recess: why the delay, and when will we be given the date?
	My right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Sleaford and North Hykeham (Mr. Hogg) has previously raised the question of the new arrangements for passports, under which people renewing their passports will have to be interviewed—up to 6 million interviews a year managed by the Home Office. We now know that the new e-passports might have to be reissued every two years, which would lead to a massive increase in the number of interviews required. May we have a statement from the Home Secretary on how the Home Office, which is not fit for purpose, will cope?
	Finally, may we have a statement from the Secretary of State for Health? The Government have dropped a pledge to build or refurbish 50 community hospitals. The Department of Health has given the go-ahead for the refurbishment of only one community hospital and three health centres, while five community hospitals have been closed in the past year. At the same time, maternity units are closing, with even the Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Bury, South (Mr. Lewis) campaigning against closure of the maternity unit in his constituency.
	The Secretary of State for Health seems to live in a parallel world. She has denied the impact of cuts and deficits and on health care. Last year, she even said that it was the best year ever for the NHS. Today, she has told the  Daily Mirror that
	"Closing NHS beds is a sign of success".
	There have been 9,000 bed closures in the past 21 months—some success rate. That paper is not known for its opposition to Labour, but it asks:
	"Is this the most extraordinary statement ever made by a Labour Health Secretary?"
	We need a statement from the Health Secretary, so that she can explain why she measures success in bed closures, so that she can apologise to the patients who are suffering as a result of her policies and so that Members on both sides of the House can tell her exactly what they and the public think of the Government's cuts in the NHS.

Peter Bone: In 1996-97, the NHS spent £2,600 million on administrative staff. I congratulate the Government on increasing NHS expenditure, but is it not unfortunate that the sum spent on administrative staff has now reached£5.7 billion? May we have a statement or a debate on the NHS, especially spiralling increases in spending on administrative staff?

Jack Straw: I continue to serve as a governor of one of the country's finest further education colleges—Blackburn college—and I am not aware that our budget has been cut. Indeed, I know that the budget has increased significantly. Of course, there are pressures on, for example, some aspects of non-vocational adult education. There is an issue about choices, which we must all face if we are to improve the overall skill level of the British people. Those choices would confront any Conservative Government—more so, because they would spend less—that the hon. Gentleman supported.

Motion made, and Question proposed, That this House do now adjourn. —[Kevin Brennan.]
	 [Relevant documents: The Eleventh Report from the Transport Committee, Session 2005-06, on Bus Services across the UK, HC 1317, and the Government's response thereto, (Third Special Report, Session 2006-07, HC 298).]

Stephen Ladyman: To many people, buses are a lifeline. They give people access to healthcare, jobs and shops, and allow them to stay in touch with family and friends. To other people, buses are a convenient option—an alternative to using their car, and an alternative that we want more people to choose.
	Over the last half century, the number of people using our buses has fallen dramatically in many parts of the country. Deregulation two decades ago was supposed to reverse that, but it did not. Since 1997, the decline has slowed down, but not enough. It need not be like this. In places such as York, Cambridge and Brighton, buses are thriving because they are delivering the kind of service that people want. Passengers want local bus services to be regular, affordable, reliable, comfortable and safe. They want pleasant, well-lit bus stops giving good information, easy-to-use ticketing systems and services that link up smoothly with other transport, such as rail services. At a time when we are trying to tackle congestion and promote more environmentally friendly travel, it is vital that the public have good public transport choices.

David Heath: May I pursue the point made by the hon. Member for Stroud (Mr. Drew) about problems in rural areas? The Minister said that he wanted every community to benefit from bus transport. There are 120 villages in my constituency, a large number of which have no bus service at all. Some, like my own village of Witham Friary, officially have a bus service, but there is only one bus a week, and such a service is not of enormous value. How can we provide a proper public transport system with the flexibility that people need inrural areas? Have the Government a real strategy for that?

Karen Buck: We in London are particularly proud of the investment and the partnership between the Mayor and the Government, which have helped to increase bus use. Indeed, in recent years London has seen the only major modal shift towards buses in any world city.
	Does my hon. Friend share our grave concern about the fact that, in their alternative budget, Conservative members of the Greater London authority propose to end free transport for those under 18, and the fact that councillors in the London borough of Ealing are expressing enthusiasm for the removal of free public transport for older people? Does he agree that the decision to invest in free transport for children and elderly people in London is one of the reasons why we have achieved such phenomenal growth in the city?

Kevan Jones: I thank my hon. Friend the Minister for giving way, and I join him in welcoming the free bus passes for the elderly. They have been tremendously welcomed in my North Durham constituency. However, many of my elderly constituents are now finding that because Go Northern has removed bus services from isolated villages in my constituency, they have no access to a bus at all. The latest example of that is the community of Pelton Fell having its No. 739 bus removed without any consultation with local people. Therefore, although elderly people have got a free bus pass thanks to a Labour Government, thanks to a heartless bus company some of them have no access to a bus.

Stephen Ladyman: Under our proposals, it will be for the local government to make a public interest case for a quality contract. Having made such a case and having moved towards having a quality contract, if commercial operators feel that they have been unfairly disadvantaged and not properly consulted, there must be an appeal process for them to go through. We have suggested that there should be such an independent appeal process, but I hope that it will never be used because I hope that local authorities that decide to go down that route will involve everybody in making their decision.

Clive Betts: I wish to make an important point. What the Minister is trying to explain is slightly different from what appears on page 43 of "Putting Passengers First". It says there not that there can be an appeal when a local authority has reached a decision about going ahead with a quality contract, but that that automatically goes toa senior traffic commissioner, acting together with a panel of experts, who decides whether to approve it. Beyond that, there is an appeal to the transport tribunal. However, at the interim stage involving the traffic commissioner there is no appeal. The commissioner has a right to determine whether the local authority, acting in the public interest, is correct or not. That second guessing of an elected body causes great concern.

Kevan Jones: I am very grateful to my hon. Friend for giving way again. Just before Christmas, my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham(Dr. Blackman-Woods) and I had a meeting with our local bus companies and the county council, and one issue that we talked about was through-ticketing. They said that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hillsborough (Ms Smith) pointed out, competition law prevents through-ticketing and they could not legally implement it. Through-ticketing would, however, be very beneficial to my constituents and others.

Owen Paterson: I am happy to discuss that issue and I shall come on to the issue of London in a moment. There has been a huge increase in subsidy in London, which has unique circumstances. On the issue of fares for under-18s, it is a devolved issue, but as I understand it my Conservative colleagues are concerned that the service is sloppily administered and it is not clear who qualifies for it. There is also a problem with public disorder and vandalism. However, the hon. Lady should take the issue up with Conservative members on the GLA, because it is a devolved issue.
	Buses are critical in supporting labour markets in urban areas. A quarter of the work force in cities such as Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield and Leeds travel by bus. A quarter of all households in England—two fifths in London—are without access to a car and that is a principal driver of continued bus demand.
	As the Minister said, buses also have a role to play in tackling road congestion. In the right circumstances, buses can be important in encouraging modal shift from the car in congested areas. Although buses typically tend to support non-business trips, without them some such trips would, potentially, be made by car. Buses can therefore play a valuable role in attracting leisure and commuter travellers off the road network, freeing up road space and reducing travel time for business and freight traffic. Inevitably, there is a price to pay for that and it can be too high, as was beginning to be the case before deregulation.
	At this point, I wish to pay public tribute to the late Nicholas Ridley, who became Lord Ridley of Liddesdale. I am completely partisan on the subject, because he was my wife's uncle. He was one of themost remarkable members of that Conservative Government. He had many talents and was a brilliant cook, water-colourist and architect.

Gwyneth Dunwoody: I had the delight of opposing Nicholas Ridley when he introduced the TransportAct 1985 and he always had great clarity of thought. He had the simple attitude that buses cost too much, the people who used them were mainly poor and that they should be removed from that category as soon as possible. He was a sensitive colourist and a most insensitive Secretary of State for Transport.

Owen Paterson: Has it worked? It is interesting to look at the passenger figures. The Transport for London annual travel report 2005 stated that the average load was 15 passengers per bus. The mayor's target for 2011 is to increase that average load by 40 per cent. to19 passengers per bus. Yet the average capacity for a London bus, taking in all types, is 93. The Assembly's transport committee recently commissioned a value for money study of London's buses. Its consultants, Colin Buchanan and Partners, showed that the productivity of London's buses has collapsed. In 1997-98 the buses ran without a subsidy and the average bus carried 13 passengers. By 2005, the buses consumed an annual Government subsidy of £550 million and carried an average of 15 passengers per bus. The subsidy given is like paying the additional passengers to ride the buses.

Andrew Gwynne: My constituents in Greater Manchester would love the equivalent to a London bus service operating in their area. Does the hon. Gentleman not recognise that in places like Greater Manchester, where there has also been a massive increase in subsidy to private bus operators, we have not got a lot in return? The benefit of the London system, with its franchising arrangements, is that bus companies cannot just cherry-pick the profit- making routes; they must take on a whole network. Integration is part of that.

Owen Paterson: This is all very depressing. I thought that we were going to have a sensible debate. We are talking about spending a titantic slug of public money more effectively. With this extra money the Minister and his colleagues in the London Assembly have increased bus ridership in London from 13 to15 passengers on average. I am just asking whether that is a good way of spending public money. My colleagues in the London Assembly are seeing how existing subsidies can be spent more effectively and efficiently.  [Interruption.] The Minister cannot misinterpret what I am saying. He stands up and says that the Government have done a great thing by increasing bus subsidies. I am quietly trying to look and see whether those subsidies have been spent wisely. I am suggesting that my Conservative colleagues in the Assembly could spend that money more effectively.
	We should not get too hung up on London because, in many ways, the London model is unique. First it has had a big increase in subsidy by 548 per cent. at constant prices between 2001 and 2005. That is a 30p subsidy per passenger. The metropolitan areas have had their subsidy reduced by 2.5 per cent. That is a massive contrast.

Karen Buck: The hon. Gentleman is gravely underestimating the impact that the additional investment and new strategies on bus policy have had in London. The result has been half a billion additional passenger journeys. From what the hon. Gentleman is suggesting, we are led to understand that, if his colleagues have their way, the services most impacted upon will be those to the vulnerable—people who do not fall into his category of economic efficiency—older people, families and young people who have benefited by the equivalent of £1,000 ayear through free travel, night services and services to areas that have not been best served by buses hitherto. Is it not true that his drive for efficiency will impacton precisely those vulnerable individuals and communities?

Owen Paterson: I do not see that. I do not see what is good about wasting public money or what is bad about trying to spend existing sums better. The hon. Lady is talking about a nil sum gain. It is not a case of subsidies as they stand: good; any change in the regime: bad. My colleagues in the London Assembly are looking at spending the money more efficiently. I would have thought that she would have endorsed that, as would her taxpayers. London has seen an increase in its population and attracts many tourists. We must be careful because London is unique in many ways.
	In some urban areas bus usage has been increasing. Eddington was interesting on this and talked about York. Those urban areas tend to be historic towns where car restraints can be easily applied and where there is usually a widespread cultural acceptance of the need for alternative transport.

Owen Paterson: At no stage have I talked about cutting subsidies. I have talked about spending subsidies better and analysing whether existing subsidies are being well used. If the right hon. Gentleman will let me make a little progress I will touch on the Conservative party towards the end of my speech. Is he thrilled to support a Government that, after 10 years in power, brings out what is supposed to be a great new radical strategic paper, which says:
	"An efficient transport system is an important ingredient of a strong and prosperous economy"?
	It says:
	"An efficient transport system contributes to stronger and deeper labour markets"
	and
	"A large bus has the potential to carry the equivalent of several fully-loaded cars".
	We are told:
	"Buses must have the right environment in which to prosper."
	I mean, why write this stuff? What does it achieve after 10 years? I am astonished that that he stands up and says what he does when, after 10 years, we are still getting strategy papers with that sort of guff in them.

Owen Paterson: I cited cases earlier where that worked with more than one operator. It might not work for70 operators. That might involve the creation of a new idea of a partnership. What one has to have is control of the roads and the road network, and of decision making in the allocation of bus routes.
	So, let me talk about our thinking. I am conscious of time moving on and I know that other Members want to speak. As the right hon. Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, East and Wallsend (Mr. Brown) knows, the Conservative party is reviewing its polices. As I have just said, we are convinced that we will be studying carefully the development of voluntary partnerships, rather than quality contracts. We would like to see the much wider use of modern technology such as transponders, and information technology. We accept that we must review what extra statutory powers beyond their current powers local authorities and PTAs need to make partnerships work. We will review the tools of demand management available to PTAs. We will also review the obligations on private operators within partnership arrangements. That includes the minimum duration of the operation of a service—that was touched on earlier in relation to bus wars—co-operative ticketing arrangements, and data storing. We would also look at the request from some local authorities for minimum acceptable standards of operation to be increased.

Graham Stringer: I welcome the Government's White Paper, "Putting Passengers First". Thinking about that title, one wonders where they have been for the last 20 years. But it is a good title and I trust that my hon. Friends on the Front Bench will put into practice some of the ideas and proposals in the document. I am not going to use the time available to me to go into why I think that the hurdles in the White Paper are too high to replace the only available alternative test, because the Minister has made it clear that he is open to detailed suggestions. I guess that other hon. Members will make those suggestions during the debate. I also agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe (Mr. Betts) that the concessionary fare scheme looks as though, financially, it could run out of control. That is a great worry to all the passenger transport authorities in England. Again, the Minister has said that he will look at that and I am content that he will do so.
	Before I get on to the meat of what I want to say, I want to make one or two statistical points in relation to some of the comments that have been made. We are all proud that passenger numbers are going up for the first time for some years, but, in looking at those statistics, we need to be careful that we are comparing like with like. The new concessionary fare scheme came into force from last year and obviously the comparison no longer involves the same scheme as before. People who need to get to a hospital or to work may well still not be getting buses, although the overall headline figures are improving considerably. I hope that my hon. Friends on the Front Bench will look at some way of taking the statistics apart so that we can make a real comparison between what happened before the start of concessionary scheme in 1986 and what is happening now.
	I would also like to look at the comparisons that have been made by Members on both Front Benches in relation to areas where quality partnerships or the current deregulation system are said to work. I just want to point out two or three facts.
	Although passenger numbers have increased, the route network has declined in almost all small towns. Some people do not have access to services, even though more people are using them. That statistical point is similar to the one that I made previously. As my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh, North and Leith (Mark Lazarowicz) said, those towns and small areas are often served by what are essentially monopoly providers, or municipal bus companies. It is difficult to understand how one can compare such areas with the great cities of Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Leeds, Newcastle and Liverpool. However, those are not my main points.
	I have great respect for the Minister and the Under-Secretary, who are tough debaters. By the end of the consultation process, I want to feel that they are up to the fight with the bus companies. Some of the debate over the past 10 to 20 years has lacked reality. We hear talk of a Panglossian world—a Jack and Jill world—in which if only the naughty children in the passenger transport authorities and the bus companies would get on a bit better, shake hands and make friends, everything would be nice. We hear phrases such as, "We want constructive partnerships; they are the key to delivery", but if we look at what is happening we see that we are dealing, in the case of the five biggest bus companies, with avaricious, multinational companies that are public subsidy junkies. A terrific amount of public money goes into those companies and they are aggressively anti-PTAs and anti-county councils because they think that they are fighting for their lives—fighting to continue their main lining of public subsidy. They operate not competitively, as the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Mr. Paterson) seems to hope is the case, but, essentially, in monopoly or near-monopoly situations. I thus want to test whether Ministers are up to the fight with those groups.
	We have heard about, or read Committee reports outlining, the thinking in the Department for Transport. Although this might be unfair because the civil servant in question has retired, the former permanent secretary in the Department has said some extraordinary things. He was completely wrong when he appeared before the Public Accounts Committee on 23 January 2006 and said that the real difference between the system of public transport in London, which works, and that in the rest of the country arose due to the fact that London had made different choices. That statement demonstrated his inadequate knowledge of the situation. While London uses the stream of money that it receives for its bus system well, authorities in metropolitan areas face all sorts of different issues, not least of which is the threat of council tax capping if their priorities are changed. It was worrying that the permanent secretary did not seem to understand the system. I will not bore the House by going into further detail, but if people want to read further analysis of the situation, it is in the excellent report by the Transport Committee, "Bus services across the UK".
	Even more worryingly, trade weeklies, such as  Bus & Coach Buyer, contain boasts from ex-civil servants that they have more influence, by going to the Department for Transport and talking to their old pals about what they would like for the major companies, than us mere Back Benchers, by tabling early-day motions. I could supply the Ministers with quotes about that. When the Transport Committee quizzed the permanent secretary about that situation, he was complacent—that is the fairest comment that I can make. I hope that Ministers will examine the regular visits made to old chums in the Department by consultants who are paid large amounts by the bus companies. We need a greater understanding of why, over the past 20 years—certainly over the past 10 years of a Labour Government—there has been a steady stream of advice to Ministers that bringing some form of regulation back to the metropolitan areas would be a bad thing, despite the fact that that goes against most of the available evidence.
	The hon. Member for North Shropshire said—this is always in the briefing notes that my hon. Friends and I receive—that we should not go back to the 1985 system. There might be a Labour Member who wants to go back to the situation in 1985, but I cannot honestly name him or her, or point to a relevant reference. I am fairly familiar with the views of the Labour Members in the Chamber. None of them wants that to happen, so the point is irrelevant. We want better services and better use of the public money that goes into public transport.
	Let me say a few words about the financial structure of the industry itself. I was disappointed by the Government's response to the Transport Committee's report on buses. We asked a simple question, although we could perhaps have made its wording more elegant or comprehensive. We wanted the Government to tell us the level of profit at which buses become viable, or, to put it another way, the point at which bus companies start ripping off and exploiting the public sector. We received the response that that question was too difficult to answer—I am paraphrasing because I have not written it down—but that worries me a great deal. We are considering the viability of these companies. They know where the subsidy is going and understand completely how to manipulate the system, whether that is achieved through concessionary fares or by withdrawing from subsidised routes.
	I will try to illustrate what is happening by citing some figures from Manchester. The national figures are very simple and round: the big five companies make about £400 million profit each year, while £2.5 billion of public subsidy goes into them. However, the local situation in Manchester shows significant evidence of monopoly behaviour. The number of supported services has increased by 25 per cent. for no obvious reason. When those services are put out to tender, only one bus company applies, which means that the cost for each mile travelled goes up by more than 30 per cent. above inflation.
	A subsidy of about £100 million goes into the bus system in Greater Manchester, but that gives no control over what happens, except on subsidised routes. What percentage of the bus operators' costs do Ministers think that that represents? I have done some calculations to demonstrate what is happening and to explain why there will be a very tough fight—we are not dealing with nice, chummy bus companies that have the public interest at heart. First Group runs a near-monopoly in my north Manchester constituency. I estimate—I can show the working figures to anyone who is interested—that 47 per cent. of its operating costs are paid for by the taxpayer. The taxpayer has thus paid about 50 per cent. of all costs before a bus gets out of the depot. As soon as First saw that it could get extra subsidy out of the concessionary fare system, it put up its fares by 10 per cent.—it would like a little more public subsidy, thanks very much.
	I suspect that the hon. Member for North Shropshire has more faith in quality partnerships than I have. The prospect of the White Paper, which I welcome, led these rather unpleasant companies to threaten to withdraw their services and leave passengers high and dry if PTAs and councils did not get into partnerships with them at that time. Effectively, they are saying that they will leave the people we care about—who they do not care about—high and dry. That is the real fight that is going on. These people are fighting for their lives, as they are totally dependent on public subsidy.
	Brian Souter, who runs Stagecoach, recently took out adverts in the  Manchester Evening News attacking the passenger transport authority for not providing park-and-drive facilities. If he is such a great entrepreneur, why does he not do it himself? Why does he not buy the land to do it? He has huge profits in Stagecoach, as he is running more or less a monopoly in south Manchester, but that is not his attitude. He has the attitude of a 19th century mill owner, but one who wants some public subsidy as well. There were some pretty unpleasant cotton barons in 19th century Lancashire, but at least they did not ask the local authorities or the Government for money while they were grinding the faces of the workers into the ground. They did so without public subsidy, but not so in Souter's case. He wants to be feather-bedded by public subsidy against real competition.
	At the same time, Souter, along with UK North and GM Buses, which have now gone bankrupt, was prepared to destroy the economy of Manchester's city centre by blocking it up unnecessarily. They knew exactly what they were doing. They were putting pressure on Manchester city council and the passenger transport authority to co-operate with them and give them more cash. In effect, they were saying that they could wreck the city centre by stopping people coming into hospitals or offices. That is their attitude.
	To take a slight international diversion, I would like to provide a glimpse of the future. I am aware of the provenance of that phrase and that it is not usually a happy provenance when people say that they have seen the future. At the expense of the Service Employees International Union, the largest in the US, I went to look at the operations of First Group in America. I went to Jacksonville and Minneapolis-St. Paul and I also talked to drivers in Cincinnati. Together with the Transport and General Workers Union, we were extremely concerned that the practices that First Group was following in the US would soon be seen in this country.
	What I saw was horrifying, although I do not have enough time to provide all the details. First Group, operating as First Student in the US, one of the three biggest bus companies, made me feel ashamed. People who were trying to organise and form trade unions were having the wheels changed on their buses so that they were unsafe in the deepest mid-winter around Minneapolis-St. Paul, where it is often minus 20° or minus 30°, making the roads dangerous. I spoke to many drivers and many people who were trying to organise unions and the response was always the same. First was anti-trade union activity; it acted aggressively and with hostility, showing itself willing to put children's lives at risk. I spoke to the managing director over there and to the people back here. What was happening was completely unacceptable and I was ashamed that a British company was acting like that. I use that example to illustrate the fact that we are not dealing with people who have the public interest at heart.
	I have two further points before finishing. The White Paper is part of a welcome general change in attitude to public transport. The Government are saying that the deregulated system has not worked in part, which I suppose is progress. They say that it has worked in other parts, but I disagree. The Government are going to look further into having quality contracts and a change of governance. They are saying that if people want the cash to improve public transport, they will in some cases have to have road pricing and congestion charging.
	I can tell Ministers that I am not against road pricing in principle. I believe that a thoroughly sound intellectual case can be made for it at the right time, but forcing it into urban areas where it may not be appropriate—it could be a hindrance, barrier and hurdle even though it may be a good thing in its own terms—is quite wrong. I have looked into some of the details of schemes proposed for Greater Manchester—there remains more to be seen—and I do not understand why people in Manchester should pay a higher tax for using the roads there in order to get a bus, tram and possibly a rail system that should be available to them in any case. There may be a case for it, but if we ever get road pricing, I would expect either fuel duty or road tax to be decreased, which cannot happen if an experiment goes on only in one place. I therefore hope that Ministers will look further into that.

Graham Stringer: I am grateful for those comments, but my main point remains. In our current debate about quality contracts, in previous debates about improving tram systems and in future debates about improving metropolitan rail services, these issues stand on their own. Congestion road pricing is a national issue and I am unconvinced that an experiment that puts the economy and people of Manchester—or Birmingham or anywhere else that tries it—at a disadvantage in comparison with elsewhere will work.
	I respect the Minister's work and I agree with many things that he says on transport, but I must make this point. In a deregulated system or partially deregulated system—this is the key to understanding why deregulation has not worked in metropolitan areas—where car restraint and bus priority measures are in force, it becomes anti-public transport. What the private bus companies do is focus their resources onthe radial routes where cars have been moved out of the way, because they make a better return on those routes, and they withdraw services from more marginal areas where many of my constituents and others live.
	Although the proposals to target subsidy have not been widely discussed, I hope that they will work with the proposals on quality contracts. I hope that the Minister will be tough and will realise that he is in for a fight with some very tough multinational companies, which do not want this to happen. They are employing rooms full of lawyers to stop it happening, so it will not happen without a fight. I know that the Minister is tough and up to that sort of fight. I look forward to joining him in making public transport in our metropolitan areas and the rest of England a lot better. "Putting Passengers First" is a great title for a White Paper; I hope that we can make a reality of it.

Gwyneth Dunwoody: I am delighted to hear that, and I hope that the hon. Gentleman's speech will not undermine his position on the Front Bench; if he says something new, strong and policy-led, it will be such a departure that his position in the shadow transport team will not last long.
	The Government should take a clear look at what is happening in the bus system. It is true that large sums of money are being spent, including on the concessionary fares scheme, which is a delight. It has opened up all sorts of vistas, and it is a real improvement in the quality of life for many people in my constituency. It is wholly to be applauded. Also, amounts are being spent on ensuring that services are provided by an ever smaller number of private companies. In his estimable speech, my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Blackley (Graham Stringer) made it plain that five major companies are responsible for 90 per cent. of the bus services, and they not only wantonly dictate terms and conditions, but behave in a manner that cannot be defended. It is clear that many local authorities are faced with a series of faits accomplis, as companies simply remove services, without any justification, and then tell county councils or PTEs, "Fine; if you want that service to run, replace it with a subsidised service, and we will accept the extra money with thanks."
	If we are to consider doing more than stopping the decline of bus travel, and are instead to consider expanding bus travel, as the Government are doing under many of their schemes, we need to examine the behaviour of those who provide the services and those who accept the public subsidies, and they inevitably do not compete with one another. It is nonsense to say that the bus companies in this country compete, because the reality is very different. I believe that the Government are sincere in wanting not only to improve the situation in the bus industry but ensure that ever more people use busses, with all the environmental advantages that that would bring. It is no accident that large numbers of Labour Members want to debate the subject today, but that Conservative Members think that the matter is of no interest. That demonstrates clearly the difference between the two parties.
	On the Government's response to the Select Committee's inquiry, the Committee looked into bus services across the United Kingdom because we were so concerned about what is happening, given not only the concessionary fares regime but all the recent changes that have come about. The Government said in their answer to the Committee that they
	"would not want to see local authorities introducing a Quality Contracts scheme for the whole of an urban area at the same time under one contract".
	Why not? What is the advantage of letting contracts for smaller parts of the network? There is no justification for doing so. Part of the reason for introducing a quality contract is so that local authorities and passenger transport authorities can create a co-ordinated network in their area, and that is where the real benefit lies. To have several contracts within an area would complicate matters, raise costs and fail to ensure the co-ordination that the contracts are designed to provide.

Lee Scott: I thank the hon. Gentleman and agree with his comments.
	Recently, when the police have tried to bring prosecutions they were told that the closed-circuit TV on the buses was not functioning because it had no film and therefore could not be used in evidence. Companies must be made to have that in motion all the time so that it can be used and prosecutions brought. The onus for that is on the bus companies. I have said that locally and will continue to do so. Equally, however, there needs to be British Transport police back-up.
	Having mentioned my journey to the House this morning, I should like to refer to an incident that happened on the way, by which point I was on the tube. I recognise that that is not the subject of the debate, but it still has relevance. Two gentlemen decided to try to knock seven bells out of each other because one of them could not get off the train. We tried to separate them and were successful, and one of them, in good east end terms, legged it and got away. There was no one there to try to stop the fight. No staff were available. If we are to encourage greater use of public transport, it can be done only with better policing.
	I said at the beginning of my speech that I would not be party political. I commend the Mayor of London for the fact that we have more buses. However, we need to go further. People in parts of my constituency and the nearby area cannot access the buses because they do not run to the places that are slightly further outside the town centre and the shopping areas. They cannot get into those areas to use facilities such as libraries and swimming pools.
	There should be partnerships, as my hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire (Mr. Paterson) said. Partnerships work in some parts of the country and they should be extended further, with pilots to ascertain how we can get smaller hopper buses to run to the main services that access the main hubs. If that is done, we will have a first class bus service, which I support.
	My hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire referred to disabled people who use buses. There is 100 per cent. coverage in London. Again, I congratulate the Mayor and Transport for London on that. However, many users tell me that they cannot access facilities because some of the staff are not trained to help them. I ask for training to be put in place and rolled out throughout the country so that disabled people who cannot currently access services can do so. I have heard reports of people missing interviews and appointments and being unable to go shopping because buses do not contain the necessary facilities.
	When I was a child—my memory serves me well; that was a long time ago—I got the No.148 bus from the Green Man roundabout to Ilford every day to go to school. Was I ever told off for misbehaving on the bus? I was. In those days, you got a clip round the ear and you did not do it again. I got the clip and I did not do it again. However, I used the services all the time. I want a first-class service for the people of our country. I commend the work of our Committee and its Chairman and I shall continue to support it in every way I can.

George Howarth: I have read those words as well. It might have escaped the hon. Gentleman's attention that I am making a speech from the Back Benches rather than the Front Bench. Although I shall express my support for some of the Government's proposals in a moment, I hope that he will allow me to make my speech in my own way, using my own words.
	As I was saying, there is a mixture of areas even within a single city region, and my constituency illustrates that point well. One thing that all those areas have in common, whether they are urban, rural, semi-rural or suburban, is that they all have problems with bus services. Moreover, the problems are not that different from one area to another. We sometimes make too much of the differences between areas, when, in my experience, the problems are more common to most of them than we acknowledge. With £2 billion of subsidy going into the system, we should not have so many problems. That point was well made by my hon. Friends the Members for Manchester, Blackley (Graham Stringer) and for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) in relation to difficulties with certain bus companies, and I shall not repeat those arguments.
	Successful city regions need many things but, above all, they need an efficient and reliable transport system, and buses are an essential part of that mix. May I also say, as I never miss an opportunity to raise the subject in the House, that the people of Merseyside would be really pleased if we could have a light rail system? The Under-Secretary of State for Transport, my hon. Friend the Member for Glasgow, South (Mr. Harris), who is responsible for these matters, is in discussion with us to see whether we can revive the Merseytram Line 1, and I hope that we shall be able to do so. Every city region needs a mix of different kinds of transport.
	The transport system in my constituency, particularly the bus system, is not as good as it should be. That applies to urban and rural areas alike—the same problems exist throughout the area. The bus companies are able to change the timetables and the frequency of the services almost without interference. They certainly do so without any consultation and often without giving any proper notice. It is common for a bus service to be changed and for no one to know anything about it until after it has happened. All too often, people do not know about the change until their bus does not turn up at the expected time. Some services have been entirely withdrawn, which has left places such as Melling in my constituency totally isolated. Other services have stopped running in the evenings. This has happened in some parts of Kirkby, which is an urban area, and in Knowsley village, which is semi-rural. After a certain time in the evening there are either no buses at all, or a very limited service.
	So, there are problems. I do not say that in order to criticise the Government. I am sure that my hon. Friend the Minister will accept that that is the reality of the situation. I welcome the consultation document "Putting Passengers First". As others have said, it is a well-named document: putting passengers first ought to be our objective. The document provides a reasonable and reasoned approach to the problems that have been described in the debate today.
	I would, however, like to raise some concerns, and I hope that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary will be able to address them when she winds up the debate. I should say, Mr. Deputy Speaker, by way of an apology, that owing to the difficulties of travelling on the west coast main line today, I might not be able to stay here long enough to hear my hon. Friend's wind-up speech. However, I shall read it avidly on the intranet tomorrow.
	I am glad that quality contracts, which have been mentioned a number of times, form part of the Government's mixed approach, but I hope that my hon. Friend will ensure that the administrative tests are not so onerous as to put off local authorities— indeed, no more onerous than the tests that already exist. It is important to be flexible and allow PTAs to be imaginative about how they enter into partnerships.
	As we have heard, the costs of concessionary travel are causing concern, but there is also concern about the potential for fraud. I believe that smart cards will help to deal with that. Although municipal bus services were not always perfect, I think that in an ideal world they would be the best option, but it is probably impossible to get to where we would like to be from a standing start. However, I have a suggestion.
	My hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich will be familiar with Merseyrail Electrics. It has a 25-year contract with Merseytravel allowing it to provide what is known as a publicly specified and privately operated electric rail service. The long contract period gives time for any necessary improvements to be measured and introduced over time. The contract also gives the passenger transport authority a good deal of control. According to all the national measurements that have been taken, the service is efficient and reliable. I think that that model could prove very successful if applied to buses, and I hope my hon. Friend will consider it. Certainly my constituents who use the Northern line appreciate the service.
	Before I entered the House, I spent 14 years as a member of a local authority, Knowsley council, and of its predecessor, Huyton urban district council. I continue to believe strongly that the more control we give to local authorities, the more likely they are to administer services in a way that meets local needs. I was pleased to note from his speech that my hon. Friend the Minister was taken with that idea.
	Merseytravel, my local PTA, is a very good authority. Its chair, Councillor Mark Dowd, is a great political leader and a great advocate for public transport for Merseyside, and for the whole country in respect of some of the bodies on which he serves. Its chief executive, Neil Scales—I think that his full title is chief executive and director general—is well regarded by the Department for Transport, in transport circles and by those of us who regularly deal with Merseytravel. People like that represent the future of public transport, and people like that are the right people to deal with bus services. I hope that through the measures in the consultation document, we can transfer more power and control to such people because I trust them to deal with bus services—and although I trust my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary, I am not entirely convinced that I trust her Department in its entirety instead of a local authority.

Chris Mole: I am honoured to follow my right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, East and Wallsend (Mr. Brown), who remarked on the sequence of speakers in the debate and made many of the points that I want to make about the importance of buses in public transport.
	To whom are bus services important? My hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) mentioned the large number of female bus users, but many older people use them too. We are moving from the perception that to be pro-bus is to be anti-car, and a consensus is forming about the need to deal with climate change and reduce carbon dioxide. To that end, we need coherence and consistency in the public transport initiatives adopted by all parties, at both national and local levels.
	Buses play a crucial role in the provision of quality choices for modal shifting. I was a county council leader between 1993 and 2001, and introduced various public transport initiatives. A number of park-and-ride schemes were deployed around Ipswich, and it was interesting to hear what people said about buses when they had not been on one for years. They were pleased to see innovations such as double glazing, which showed that their resistance to public omnibuses was based on entirely outdated perceptions about what it was like to use them regularly.
	If this debate had been held last month, I might have been tempted to say that Ipswich could provide some glimpses into the future of bus services. Buses provide an alternative to private car use on some journeys, and they are very useful for getting people to work or to the shops. Indeed, as the leader of the county council I used to look forward to receiving a letter from someone who wrote annually when the county council re-approved a rural bus route subsidy, saying, "Thank you very much for doing this again. It means that I can continue in my employment for another 12 months."
	If this debate had been last month I would have liked to invite hon. Members to come to Ipswich to see a glimpse of the future. I would never have thought to claim that we were in any way leading the pack on every possible initiative. Obviously, when we hear of the achievements in London, we recognise that some of the best practice is already in our capital. I would have said that over the years, particularly when Suffolk county council had a Labour leadership, we had a Labour borough council and a Labour Government, bus services were beginning to motor. We saw the introduction of a guided bus way, giving buses priority in avoiding congestion on one of our busiest radial routes out of town. We had bus priority and gating measures at traffic lights that, unfortunately, were opposed by local Conservatives at every turn. Since 2004 when they took over leadership of Ipswich borough council they have messed about with bus lane priorities and bus gating measures annually. That is hugely regrettable given the evident advantage that that gave to buses in reducing journey times and increasing reliability and adherence to timetables.
	To those infrastructure measures introduced by the local authority, I would add real time passenger information. On the few routes into which we have managed to tiptoe with RTPI, the public have shown an appetite for it. One route used a satellite space technology, so bus users could monitor buses over the internet. That was developed in co-operation with local business. I should have liked to see that develop into a local texting-based bus alerting system.
	Investment in frequency is critical in passenger psychology. Services should be frequent and reliable. Some of the methods around RTPI are an attempt to bolster passenger confidence that when they go to the bus stop, the bus will turn up. The more frequent the service, the more confident are passengers that if they turn up, the service will be along shortly and if they have just missed the bus, they will not have to wait too long for the next. That is critical to ensuring that services are financially viable and have a high level of ridership. Tinkering with service frequencies is a dangerous game.
	Park-and-ride schemes have been an enormously successful element of the central Ipswich transport system. The first two schemes were introduced without Government subsidy and the third was supported through local transport plan arrangements. Their success is measured by a monthly increase in passenger usage of between 2 and 3 per cent., and they are the mainstay of the increase in bus ridership to and from Ipswich. The schemes are operated under parking regulations rather than the bus service regime, but they have taken 1.5 million car journeys off the roads in Ipswich over the past few years.
	Another feature of a sustainable future will be a co-operative—partnership—approach between local authorities and bus companies to meet the needs of new developments. Ravenswood in Ipswich is a major development on a former airfield, where we secured support from the developers for the introduction of an up-front bus route. The service is one of the fastest growing in the town in terms of usage. People moving into the development have had the option of quality public transport from day one, so they have not got into the habit of using cars.
	That example shows that we have a forward-looking bus company. There have been many claims of uniqueness in this debate, but Ipswich is the only non-metropolitan district that still has a corporately owned bus company. Ipswich borough council is the sole shareholder in Ipswich Buses and has provided proactive partnership in the initiatives that I have described.
	Last month, I was pleased to be invited by Ipswich Buses to the launch of its new fleet of six Scania buses for service 13, which shows the company's forward thinking on how best to meet the needs of passengers. For me, the most pleasant surprise was that the new buses had leather seating. It had been fitted in the confidence that if the quality of the environment was high, people would respect the buses and they would be less subject to damage. However, there are also eight CCTV cameras on every bus, which are linked to the borough's safety system.
	Some Members asked about security on buses. Bus companies are frequently subject to ill-founded claims for damages that people say were sustained on buses, in the hope of reaching an out-of-court settlement because the company will not want the cost of an expensive court hearing. There is some early evidence from Ipswich Buses that, when people discover that what has happened on every bus journey has been recorded, quite often some of those unfounded claims for compensation are withdrawn and the bus company saves the expense that it might otherwise have been put to.
	I was pleased that a bus company that is as forward looking as Ipswich Buses was introducing six excellent new buses on one of its services and that those buses were going to be fully accessible and compatiblewith the Disabled Persons Transport Advisory Committee—DPTAC—standard, as is true of 100 per cent. of the existing fleet. Had we had this debate last month, I might have told Members that they should come to Ipswich for a glimpse of the future.
	The public have a simple perspective. It is all well and fine to talk about the regulatory regimes, but the public's perspective is clear. If a service is withdrawn by a private operator or the frequency of buses is reduced, they think that the local authority is responsible. They think that services should be frequent, that buses should be clean and smart, and that fares should be reasonable. The public do not think that there should be the absurd complexities associated with through-ticketing. I urge my hon. Friends on the Front Bench to look closely at what they can do to work with their colleagues in the Department of Trade and Industry to look at the application of competition law to through-ticketing. It does appear to create some nonsenses that I know we would have overcome in Ipswich.
	Although we would certainly have overcome those difficulties last month, this month is a different story. Not a week after I was pleased to be involved in the launch of the six new buses, I discovered that the shareholder—the now Conservative and Liberal Democrat-run Ipswich borough council—had told the bus company directors that it wanted to withdraw £975,000 of share dividends and that it required a dividend of £162,000 every year until 2009, when it was going to introduce a £500,000 annual rental on the depot.
	That will have a huge impact on services. The proposals are enormously regrettable and there has been much hostile reaction from my constituents. They will mean that—whereas we were able to launch six new vehicles last month—there will be no investment in new vehicles for the period of the plan. They will mean the withdrawal of the present day-rover ticket, which has been a boon to many, and a reduction in evening and Sunday services on many routes. Buses on routes 5, 7, 11 and 15 would be reduced by the Tory and Liberal council from four per hour to three per hour. Buses on the No. 2 route would go from half hourly to hourly, on the No. 12 route from three per hour to two per day, and on the No. 16 route from three per hour to two per hour. The No. 14 service would be cut entirely.
	I said earlier that the public have a very simple view of these things. They expect a good standard of frequency. There is a huge danger that the proposal made by the Conservative and Liberal-controlled council will lead to some of the four routes with reduced frequencies that I identified becoming less patronised because people will be less confident that if they turn up at a bus stop, they will be able to get a bus and go. There is a risk that profitability will thus decrease and that the routes will become subject to more financial scrutiny.
	I would have liked to have been able to say that if hon. Members came to Ipswich, they might have a glimpse of an aspect of the future of bus services. However, despite the fine words about the environment of the Conservatives and Liberals who run our council, they plan to do something else. It is time to put an end to that, so I hope that the good people of Ipswich will put every pressure on Ipswich borough council to reverse the proposal because it would be enormously damaging to all people who use buses for leisure, to get to work and in every aspect of their daily lives.

Paul Truswell: There is always a danger in making regular contributions in the House about buses of being categorised, or even caricatured, as being something of an anorak, and I should like to make it clear from the outset that I do not collect bus numbers or bus ephemera, but I do collect hundreds of constituents' letters complaining about the quality of bus services and cuts in them.
	As I looked around the Chamber earlier today, I saw a lot of familiar faces—some of them have now gone—including my hon. Friends the Members for Eccles (Ian Stewart), for Manchester, Blackley (Graham Stringer) and for Sheffield, Attercliffe (Mr. Betts) and my right hon. Friends the Members for Knowsley, North and Sefton, East (Mr. Howarth) and for Newcastle upon Tyne, East and Wallsend (Mr. Brown), who has got form as a lobbyist on PTEs and quality contracts.
	For years, we few, we happy few, we band of brothers and sisters have banged the drum in favour of having more local powers for bus services, and we have continually banged our heads against a brick wall. That is why the debate, initiated in Government time, is such a massive watershed for us, and the Minister is smiling in acknowledgement. As my hon. Friend the Member for Eccles said, we have made our case in numerous Adjournment debates. Successive Ministers have read their briefings from civil servants, and they have dead batted our demands. In fact, it has been like facing a procession of Geoff Boycotts, quite frankly.
	At the Labour conference in autumn, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Transport said that he would
	"act to empower local communities. I will act to give the local transport authorities that need them real powers to make a difference."
	Amen and alleluia to that! At the time, I did not believe that such comment was possible; I had to pinch myself, and I even scoured the internet for reports of it, but I have confirmed that the Secretary of State did indeed say that.
	However, to echo a point made by previous speakers, including my hon. Friend the Member for Eccles, there is a "but". As is often the case, Old Nick lurks in the thicket, and the devil is in the detail, to use the cliché usually employed in the Chamber. Talking of Old Nick, I noted that the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Mr. Paterson) paid overt and eulogistic tribute to Nicholas Ridley. I submit that, when it came to bus policy, and several other areas of policy, Nicholas Ridley approached with his bow doors well and truly open, because bus deregulation has been an absolute disaster. The hon. Gentleman paid tacit and implicit tribute to Margaret Thatcher, too, because is was she who said, when in office, that any man who travelled on buses at the age of 26 had to regard himself as a failure. That characterised Tory policy then, and, despite all the embellishments to it that we have heard today, it characterises Tory policy now.

Paul Truswell: I thank the hon. Gentleman for that extremely helpful intervention. The point was made well by my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Blackley, that we do not want to go back to the deregulated days, although that has its attractions. We want a system of regulation. The Conservative spokesman, the hon. Member for North Shropshire, said that if we tightened up the way in which we use the subsidy system, everything would be okay. The reason that the subsidy system does not work is that we do not have any way of regulating it, as there are no contracts to which to keep people. In many areas, there is, in practice, a monopoly, and bus operators virtually get away with murder, as has always been said.
	As I was saying before I was interrupted, though not rudely, I cannot stress how important it is that quality contracts are made a more realistic option, as is suggested in the Select Committee report. We cannot have another false dawn, which is what a number of us predicted when quality contracts were introduced in the Transport Act 2000. Since deregulation, quality and standards have undoubtedly fallen, irrespective of what has been said by Conservative Members. In west Yorkshire, fares have gone up by over 50 per cent. in real terms, and that is a disincentive for people to travel by bus. The number of passengers has fallen by almost 40 per cent., which, in round figures, is some100 million passenger journeys. Declines in other PTE areas have been even more precipitous.
	As has been said, bus companies can pick and choose what services they provide and where they provide them, and they can continue to make profits even when they are providing a poor service—services that are chopped, changed, missing or late. Passengers simply feel powerless in the face of that, and many people are denied a reliable and affordable service to work, school, college, the shops, health centres and hospitals.
	We heard some pious comments about the needs of people with disabilities. People with disabilities in my constituency plead for one thing: stability. They want services that they can trust, so that when they go out, they have a fair chance of the bus actually turning up. That is something that the deregulated system has simply failed to provide.
	When services are trimmed or cut, people understandably, as we have heard, turn to their MPs, their councillors or the passenger transport executive, only to find that there is precious little that they can do. What we get from the operators when they cut services is what I call the two-finger response. First, they say that the services are not profitable, and secondly, they suggest that we ask the PTE to give the operators even more subsidy to continue to run them.
	Passenger transport executives such as Metro in west Yorkshire currently subsidise about 13 per cent. of services. The rest are out of their control. In its own terms, deregulation has been an abject failure because it is impossible to gauge whether the taxpayer is getting value for money in a monopoly situation where only one company tenders for each contract.
	The network in my area is pretty typical of comparable areas. I cannot speak for urban areas. There are high frequency routes, such as the No. 4 to Pudsey, 16 to Farsley and 42 to Old Farnley, together with a combination of routes on the Leeds-Bradford corridor. The reason why those services are so frequent is that it is in the interests of the bus operators to maximise their profit by concentrating on routes with a captive market. Off that beaten track, in areas where there is a social need, such as council estates, the picture is dramatically different. The Opposition need to recognise that.
	The area has been subject to successive service changes, which have led to a concentration of resources and a move away from the unprofitable but socially desirable services. Last year, for example, a whole community was cut off a route without notice, leaving many residents, especially older people, stranded.
	Great play has been made of the use of partnerships. In the civil service briefs and speeches that we used to get from the Minister until recently, there was a strong emphasis on partnerships. It must be accepted, even by people like me, that they work in certain circumstances, but only in locations such as those described by the hon. Member for North Shropshire and wherethe partnership is established entirely at the behest of the bus operator. If there is a profit in it for them, they will do it. If not, there is no prospect of a voluntary partnership arrangement.
	Changes have been made in my area to services such as the No. 97, 647 and 651 in the Guiseley and Yeadon areas. We could all recite a litany of problems, and a number of us have done so. The changes cause tremendous problems for regular travellers who depend on those services, quite apart from those who might be attracted out of their cars to use them if they were available and reliable. Frequency has been reduced on services that penetrate local housing estates and provide links to important shopping centres like Pudsey and the Owlcotes centre in my constituency.
	Links to facilities such as health centres, post offices and supermarkets are often ignored because the operator has no interest in meeting the public need, only in making a profit. Notable examples are the fact that there is no public transport link from my constituency to the newly rebuilt Wharfedale hospital in Otley or to the primary health care facilities at Eccleshill in Bradford, which are extremely important to many of my constituents who do not have ready access to alternative forms of transport.
	The decline in bus services, as has been said repeatedly, affects everyone, not just those who depend on buses or those who would like to use buses more. Poor services lead to increased car use, which creates even more congestion, pollution and road safety hazards in all our communities. On carbon emissions, we know from research carried out by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research that per passenger mile, coach and bus travel produces only 30 per cent. of the CO2 created by petrol fuelled cars and 40 per cent. of that created by diesels.
	Over the years, bus operators have won two important public relations battles. The first is to suggest that deregulation has worked; they clearly have dupes on the Opposition Benches to support that notion. The second is that local authorities and passenger transport authorities are not fit for purpose as regards commissioning bus services. That will continue to be a major bone of contention between certain Labour Members and our Front-Bench colleagues.
	Replacement of the "only practicable way test" is extremely welcome, but concerns have been expressed about the new process. If there is one message that I would like to convey to my hon. Friends on the Front Bench, it is that we do not want an insuperable legal high jump to be replaced by an interminable bureaucratic marathon, nor do we want a period of instability and uncertainty to be created by unnecessary tinkering with local structures.
	It would be interesting to know whether Ministers have carried out any assessment of how long it would take for quality contracts to go through to implementation under the process set out in the document "Putting Passengers First". It is a convoluted process that, if traced through step by step, could take an incredibly long time. PTAs and PTEs may have to negotiate with civil servants, especially as part of the QC approach requires Government funding. There may then be intervention by the traffic commissioners, an appeal to the transport tribunal, and almost inevitably, given that bus operators will fight this tooth and nail, a judicial review. That is why the comments of my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody), to whom we all genuflect on these issues, are absolutely right and require a response. I hope that Ministers understand why my hon. Friends and I do not think that the process sits squarely with what my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State said at the party conference about giving
	"local transport authorities that need them real powers to make a difference".
	My hon. Friend the Member for Eccles asked several questions that are of interest to those of us who represent areas with PTEs, and I do not intend to reiterate those.
	Turning to concessionary fares, I know from a recent meeting that my hon. Friend the Minister is fully aware of my personal concerns regarding the concessionary fare scheme. At the moment, the system appears to be giving a blank cheque to operators, who are in some areas jacking up their off-peak cash fares to up the ante in terms of raking in more and more public money by way of subsidy. This firm message needs to go out from my colleagues on the Front Bench: "If you continue to operate those sorts of manipulative and profiteering approaches to fares in order to milk the public purse for money, that will be held in the balance when we come to look at issues relating to regulation and quality contracts."
	The comprehensive spending review process that is moving towards a conclusion is an opportunity not only to meet some of the broader investment requirements of city regions such as Leeds but to deal with issues relating to concessionary fares. It is crucial, as my right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne, East and Wallsend (Mr. Brown) said, that local authorities are reimbursed for running the concessionary fare system. At the moment, unless we get a grip on the matter and bring some control to bear, more and more services and concessionary schemes for other bus users will be cut to fuel the monster that we have created.
	I am most familiar with Leeds because I am one of its Members of Parliament. In the past 20 years, Leeds has created more jobs than any other major city apart from London. Between 1981 and 2002, it added 86,000 new jobs to its work force and is expected to provide approximately 46 per cent. of the region's additional 60,000 jobs between 2004 and 2014. Although jobs have been created in Leeds, many of the people who take them up live outside the city boundary.
	Passenger transport executive areas have some of the worst concentrations of deprivation in the country, with 84 out of the 100 most deprived neighbourhoods located in metropolitan areas. Investment to boost transport, especially buses, because of the proportion of public transport journeys for which they account, is essential to our areas.
	As I have said previously, even in Leeds, where there are sceptics like me, we have examples of effective partnership working. We have quality bus corridors, guided bus lanes and the free city bus service that links key points in the city with the main rail station. Welcome though those schemes are, it is clear that the resources available to PTEs are not enough to keep pace with the needs of the growing economies of our major cities or to boost the initiatives that make a genuine difference to bus travel.
	I make no bones about reiterating the point that was made about transport spending. In 2001, spending in London was £233 per head. By 2005-06, it had increased to £631 per head. London is our capital and needs a decent transport system, so no one begrudges priority being given to it. However, in Yorkshire and Humber, spending on transport in 2001 was £117 per head. By 2005-06, that had increased to £197 per head. The increase is welcome, but compared with what is happening in London—and other parts of the country—it is grossly inadequate.
	"Putting Passengers First", the Bill that will emanate from the discussions and the comprehensive spending review provide enormous opportunities for improving bus services in Leeds, west Yorkshire and the United Kingdom. I hope that my hon. Friends will seize them.

Iain Wright: I might have to take the hon. Gentleman to the Standards Board over that intervention; he has obviously been reading my speech. My next paragraph is about access to health services, and nowhere are these problems more apparent.
	North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Trust is currently a two-hospital site, with some services at the University hospital of Hartlepool and some at the University hospital of North Tees. Bus provision between the two hospitals is extremely poor. Anyone attending an appointment in a hospital outside their town, whether it be Hartlepool or Stockton, will find it time-consuming and stressful, and attending the appointment will probably require two or three changes of bus, which can take hours and cause stress. There is also the prospect of access to health services getting worse without active and imaginative intervention.
	A review of acute services in the area by the independent reconfiguration panel concluded that a single-site hospital should be built between Hartlepool and Stockton. Because of the poor level of bus provision, I suppose that that option would be ideal because, at present, any location will be equally inaccessible to both communities. Any planning with regard to changes in acute services will need to adopt accessibility and the provision of bus transport to the new hospital as fundamental principles. I am concerned that that might not happen, however, based on current experience and on what my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey said on this issue earlier.
	One of the most modern, high-quality hospitals in the country is James Cook hospital in the south of the Tees valley. However, the bus service that allows Hartlepool people to travel to James Cook is due to be withdrawn soon because the private bus operator wants a greater level of subsidy to continue running the service. There must be a reason for that. There must also be a reason why, despite all the ingredients in my constituency and the surrounding area being in place for a co-ordinated and accessible first-class bus service, it is not happening.
	I think that the reason is deregulation. I agree with the Transport Committee's observation that the deregulated regime has exacerbated the decline in bus usage over the past 20 years. Deregulation has meant that bus operators are free to pick and choose which services they operate. They are free to concentrate on the more lucrative routes in an area, at the expense of the routes that could improve accessibility for more passengers, particularly the more vulnerable and disadvantaged in society.
	With deregulation we have the worst of all possible worlds. Either there is fierce competition among bus companies for the profitable services, with operators racing—quite often literally—to compete for the same customers on the same routes, causing chaos and confusion among passengers, or more commonly—certainly in my area—a single operator has a monopoly and therefore has the local authority and passengers over a barrel. Services can be chopped, changed or stopped with very little notice or consultation. The threat of cancelled services can extract extra subsidies from the local authority, or services are merely stopped abruptly, as happened recently in my constituency. Coupled with the GP surgery's move from West View to the Headland, the cancellation of the No. 5 service in the north of the town, which served the West View and Headland areas, means that hundreds of people in one of the most deprived parts of the country and suffering from appalling health inequalities no longer have access to health care.
	I fear that, to maintain profitability, bus operators may concentrate on cost reduction rather than trying to raise revenue. That means cuts and reduced investment. It means, for instance, that older buses are not renovated. Some bus drivers in my constituency are worried about increasing working hours, which are part of the same problem. It is all about worsening terms and conditions and cutting services, and it results in a vicious circle. Cuts impair the quality and reliability of the service, which in turn leads to a reduction in the number of passengers. Passengers who are unhappy with the service will want to go elsewhere. In the context of confusing service provision, it is little wonder that potential passengers vote with their feet or their cars—if they have cars—or by reducing the quality of their own and their families' lives by not taking up employment, training, health or leisure opportunities.
	It is essential for the Government to intervene to resolve those problems. I agree with my hon. Friend the Minister, who wrote in her foreword to the Confederation of Passenger Transport's 2006 document "On The Move":
	"buses can only deliver their full potential if they are given the right conditions. Frankly, the creation of the best conditions cannot be left to chance. Active participation by operators and authorities working together is the way forward".
	That is why I think the proposals in "Putting Passengers First", the Department's 2006 document, are so important. The statutory quality partnership and quality contract schemes are important principles that will raise the quality of bus service.
	Quality contract partnerships should be explored in more detail in Hartlepool. The local authority should be given a clear responsibility for developing and supporting the infrastructure that is necessary to provide a first-class bus network in the area. The authority should be responsible for high-quality bus stops, real-time timetable information, bus priority lanes and signalling priority for buses. My hon. Friend the Member for Ipswich (Chris Mole), who is no longer in the Chamber, made some interesting suggestions about the possibility of texting passengers information about when buses would arrive. I think that we need to be innovative in that way, and the local authority could provide the necessary infrastructure.
	In return, a single operator or group of operators should have responsibility for providing a comprehensive and socially inclusive bus service, incorporating not just lucrative routes, but routes that are considered to be socially important. There should be modern, environmentally friendly, accessible buses that all members of society can use. All the research I have seen suggests that the impact of every £1 spent by local authorities on bus priority schemes is equivalent to that of £3 of direct bus subsidy for private companies.
	Partnerships can be effective and efficient and provide a way of improving bus services, but they need extra teeth. I welcome the changes that the Department proposed in December, including the proposal to replace the "only practicable way" test in the terms of quality contract schemes with a public-interest test. As my hon. Friend the Member for Pudsey said, the devil will be in the detail, but I am pleased that the bar has been lowered. I hope that the change will bring an end to deregulation for local authorities and their communities, and revised and modern regulation for the benefit of passengers.
	I want to say a little about the terms and conditions of bus drivers. Although I am not part of the Transport and General Workers Union, I welcome its campaign on the subject. I am concerned, as are bus drivers in my constituency, that the drive for cost cutting by bus operators has led to longer bus driver hours, without breaks. Driving on increasingly busy streets for periods such as five and a half hours or six hours at a time, with increasing road rage from fellow drivers, is not conducive to safe and alert driving. I am worried that longer hours put at risk the safety of drivers, their passengers and other road users.
	I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister recalls that I have tabled written parliamentary questions to her on the matter under discussion, and I hope that she will address that in her winding-up speech, as well as the TGWU campaign to drive down driver hours and for there to be more frequent breaks. I look forward to hearing what the Minister has to say and, more importantly, to seeing that there is a better regime of regulation for the benefit of existing and future passengers and for the country as a whole.

Tobias Ellwood: The hon. Gentleman will not be surprised to learn that I do not agree with what he says. What I am emphasising is that if you, Mr. Deputy Speaker, had been strict, many contributors to the debate would have been ruled out of order for straying from talking simply about buses. I, too, am likely to stray.
	There is a certain irony in that we are having this debate on a day when there is a lot of snow outside and much of our transport system in Britain has ground to a halt. I cycled into work this morning, as I do on most mornings, and I was amazed at how few cars were on the roads—and at how few buses there were, as well. That might have been because many people decided to stay at home.
	The backdrop to this debate—on buses, transport, or however else we might address it—is the TransportAct 1985. Following that, we have had the various Transport Committee reports, which the hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) has been involved in and spoken about. Most recently, the Eddington transport study was produced in December last year.
	However, I want to focus on an aspect of the Stern review. It addresses climate change and the role that public transport can play in cutting emissions. We must not forget that emphasis if we are to take global warming seriously. Increasing the use of public transport is pivotal to achieving our aims in that regard.
	It has been said that problems have been caused as a result of the privatisation that stems from the 1985 Act, and they must be looked at. Currently, just five companies manage 95 per cent. of our bus network. That raises questions about competition and diversity of use. It is also worth noting that there has been a net decline in the use of buses outside London. Members of all parties must address that.
	I have heard many times that the Labour party thinks that the Conservatives are in love with the motor car. No doubt that observation will be met with nods approval. In fact, there are many Members in all parts of the House—

Tobias Ellwood: I am not familiar with those proposals, so I cannot comment on them now. I am surprised by the reluctance to consider such ideas, as we must think outside the box when it comes to meeting future transport needs. Simply suggesting a bus lane when there is no space for one will not work or solve the huge problems that we have identified in Bournemouth. In 15 or 20 years, we will see such schemes in many towns across Europe, given the need to move people swiftly from one side of town to the other by public transport.
	We have an environmental and economic obligation to improve public transport, but as more and more passengers are dissatisfied with bus services they are using the buses less and less. I hope that in the little time that the Government have left in office we will see some serious initiatives that will turn around our bus services and make them work for Britain.

Clive Betts: I welcome the Government's consultation document, "Putting Passengers First", and this debate in Government time. I also welcome the Minister's clear commitment to further and wide consultation on the proposals, which is the right way to approach making legislation.
	For some time, it has been fairly obvious to bus passengers and would-be bus passengers in Sheffield and south Yorkshire—and to the PTA, local councils and local MPs—that the current arrangements do not work. I welcome the Select Committee report that supports that conclusion, and it is nice to see that Ministers now agree that there has to be a change.
	I listened with some amazement to the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Mr. Paterson), who opened the debate by saying that deregulation had arrested the decline of bus usage in this country. What has happened in south Yorkshire since 1986 has been a complete disaster.
	It is probably not surprising that the number of bus passengers is only one third of what it used to be, nor that the total mileage covered by the bus companies is only two thirds of what it was formerly. Since 1986, fares have risen by 1,300 per cent., compared with an increase in the retail prices index of 100 per cent. in the same period. Buses have become a very expensive form of transport, especially for people on low incomes.
	The arrangements in south Yorkshire and Sheffield mean that, effectively, there is no comprehensive bus service or network. Because there is no through-ticketing to speak of, there is no integration of service. The original idea behind Sheffield's Supertram was that local bus services would feed into its route, thus achieving co-ordinated local transport provision. As soon as the tram was built, however, the bus companies altered their routes to compete with it. The result was that they were less user friendly for the local population.
	Some of my constituents do not have well paid jobs, but they have to get up early to get to work by 7 am. Having no car, they have to rely on their local bus; yet the bus companies need give only 42 days notice before taking a service away: when that happens, they effectively take away people's jobs as well. The people who have suffered most in south Yorkshire since 1986 are those who are socially and economically excluded, and that exclusion is often due to the fact that local public transport provision and bus services are so poor.
	I accept that Ministers are right to say that local PTAs should be able to choose from a range of options. The partnership arrangements that exist in some parts of the country can work well, although only in certain very particular circumstances. I remember very well the proposals a few years ago for a transport partnership in Sheffield, which promised improved services in the north of the city. We soon realised that those improvements were being achieved by transferring buses from the south of Sheffield. That was how the partnership was being delivered, and the approach displayed by bus companies in general renders many of us highly sceptical about their intentions when they talk about improving services.
	Many of us believe that quality contracts represent the best way forward for our localities. We do not want to go back to 1986, with municipal bus companies and full regulation; instead, we want to draw on the London experience, because we recognise thatthe capital has certain unique features. I welcome the proposals in the document to remove the "only practicable way" test, as it is clearly a major obstacle to the introduction of quality contracts, and to remove the role of Secretary of State in second- guessing what local transport authorities do. Both proposals are eminently sensible.
	Are Ministers sure that they have got right the process for instituting quality contracts in the future? The governance of local transport authorities—that is, whether members are directly or indirectly elected—has yet to be finally determined but, ultimately, those members will be accountable. If an authority decides that a quality contract is the best way to deliver services for bus passengers, and would-be passengers, there needs to be a simple and effective way to introduce such a contract.
	What must not happen is that, in five or six years' time, we find ourselves asking, "Why haven't quality contracts happened? We know that they are the right way to deliver bus services in many parts of the country, but why haven't they happened for technical reasons." Those are the questions that the current legislation has forced us to ask.
	Last night I asked the director-general of South Yorkshire PTE about extra resources. A lot of extra money has been spent on delivering bus franchising in London, but he said that he believed there is competition out there if we can tap into it. The steps that South Yorkshire has taken down the quality contract route have shown that a number of bus companies, some of which do not currently operate in this country, are interested in tendering for franchises. He believes that if we move to quality contracts now, an enormous range of benefits will result: a single network, integration between bus services and other forms of transport such as trains and trams, through- ticketing, removal of the oldest buses, removal of congestion on some routes where there is competition and buses are falling over themselves, diversion of buses on to routes to communities that are currently not served at all and smoothed out timetables, such as the one for the route from Mosborough in my constituency, from where four buses an hour run into town but where there is a 25-minute wait twice an hour because the buses run close together and are from different companies between which there is no co-operation. Franchising would provide stability of service for the passenger, thereby avoiding the 42-day change, which costs people their jobs, and ensuring that operators know where they stand.
	The director-general also believes that by increasing services we would get better value than we are currently getting from our tendered service, whereby bus operators increase the price every year and fewer routes are run at an increased cost to the PTE. All those benefits could be delivered with no extra funding. If we had more funding, we could do even better. All those improvements—an integrated network, newer buses, better dispersal of buses, better co-ordination of timetables and greater stability—could be delivered for the same sum. We must, therefore, look seriously at that and, if there are obstacles in the way, we must remove them.
	I have already expressed concerns, as have others, about the way in which bus operators are using the concessionary fares scheme. We want a really good scheme that is valued by pensioners throughout the whole country. Bus operators are increasing fares cleverly. They are not increasing fares on weekly tickets as much as one-off fares because they know that those who pay for weekly tickets use the bus regularly. They are increasing the one-off ticket fares, knowing that they will get compensation for concessionary travel. They have increased fares by 10 per cent. We know that the PTE will get only a 4 per cent. increase in its grant, so the gap has to be filled by cuts in tendered services. That is what will happen unless we change the scheme.
	There is not the same problem in London because the concessionary scheme is part of the package and operators have to tender for the whole package, including the concessions. There is an element of competition for the pricing of concessionary fares, which does not happen outside London, where operators are simply handed a sum of money. They then go to appeal, so it is not even within the control of the PTE to come to an arrangement with operators. It would greatly benefit local bus users, PTEs and the Government in the proper use of public money ifwe made different arrangements for funding concessionary fares through a quality contract arrangement.
	Let us make sure that we get it right. Let us make sure that we do not simply have a good idea that could deliver enormous improvements in bus services for our constituents and could get people who do not currently use buses to use them, but then, for all our good intentions, fail to deliver a workable practicable system.
	As I say, I was talking to directors-general of PTEs last night, including Roy Wicks for south Yorkshire. He has been progressive in looking at these issues and I commend him for the initiative that South Yorkshire PTE has taken so far on quality contracts. As professional technical officers, they believe that the process to put passengers first could take even longer than the current arrangements. The best guess is that it would take at least 21 months to implement current arrangements, considering what a PTE and executive would have to go through—probably rightly—followed by the traffic commissioner, followed by an appeal to a tribunal, followed by a potential court appeal and a potential judicial review. That could take much longer than 21 months. If the process takes 21 months, it will not happen. Other Members have spoken about timetables and it is important for Ministers to address those points.
	Before a transport executive decides whether to recommend a quality contract to the transport authority, it should fully assess the transport needs in the area. It should consult the public and local authorities and reach agreement on bus priority measures. It should assess the financial implications, which are important. It is absolutely right to do all that before recommending that the authority go ahead with a quality contract. My concerns are about the next two steps, however.
	First, I shall deal with the appeal mechanism. I understand the Minister's view that appeal by judicial review is a messy, time-consuming business, but will appeals to a transport tribunal be made on the same basis as a judicial review, in that they will not second-guess the policy reasons why the PTE and the PTA came to a view, or will they be held on the same grounds as judicial review? In that case, the appeal would simply determine whether the PTE and the PTA had gone through the right processes to reach their decision. That is a crucial question in terms of democratic accountability, so it is important that Ministers give a more thorough explanation.
	Secondly, if there is a mechanism for appeal to a transport tribunal, will there still be the possibility of judicial review, too? I take the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) about the expense involved. The transport tribunal appeal process will not reduce costs for PTEs—if that is what Ministers intend—but will add to them if there is still the option of judicial review, because bus operators will use every possible stage of the process to delay something that could cost them profits. We need clarity about the role of the transport tribunal in the appeal process. Will it be on the same basis as judicial review? Will it be in addition to judicial review, and will it also be possible to take the case to the Court of Appeal?
	I listened carefully to my hon. Friend the Minister's comments about the role of the traffic commissioner. He used the word "appeal", but according to "Putting Passengers First", there is no appeal as such—it is simply a required stage in the process—and he used the word "review", whereas according to the document, the word is "approve". After all the appropriate consultations and considerations, a scheme decided on by the PTE and the PTA has to go before a traffic commissioner, who, sitting with expert assessors, decides whether to approve it.
	The Government are legislating on local government devolution so that powers can be transferred back to elected local representatives. Local councillors on the four South Yorkshire councils were elected on a manifesto that supports the introduction of quality contracts. They formed a passenger transport authority, which instructed the passenger transport executive to go through all the necessary procedures to decide whether quality contracts were right. At the end of the process, having obtained local support, they decided in favour of quality contracts, yet a non-elected, appointed traffic commissioner could overturn that decision and refuse to approve it. After 10 years in office, is that a feasible approach for a Labour Government who believe in more devolution of power to local representatives and local councils?
	I have no problem with giving traffic commissioners extra enforcement powers, but I question their role in approving the policy decisions of elected members. No one is against expert advice, so if Ministers want to keep a role for the traffic commissioner and the independent panel of advisers, the PTE could be asked to consult them as part of the consultation and assessment process. The PTE could take account of those expert views before making a recommendation to the PTA. If the transport commissioner were brought in at that stage—so that they are not second-guessing a democratic decision, but are asked for their advice, which has to be part of the democratic process—that would be eminently sensible and would shorten the process, because it would take place in parallel rather than as an after stage.
	I hope that the Minister will take on board those comments not as criticism of the Government's ultimate intentions, but as helpful suggestions as to how they might better get towards the ultimate objective. In five years' time, we could come back and look at a piece of legislation and say that Ministers had many good intentions, but the legislation has had no practical effect, or we could find that we have passed legislation that has dramatically improved the quality of life of some of the most socially and economically excluded people in our community. That is the opportunity that we have. I hope that we are going to take it.

Robert Goodwill: When I was elected to Parliament, I was delighted to be asked to serve on the Transport Committee. I had heard much about the chairmanship of the formidable hon. Member for Crewe and Nantwich (Mrs. Dunwoody) and about the hard time she gave those giving evidence, even Ministers, when they refused to answer the question. I very much enjoyed the evidence sessions that we held when preparing our report on bus services. I did not have much personal experience of buses, as I lived in a village that had one bus to our local market town, and it came at a very inconvenient time because it worked around the school bus, which took the same route. There was also a weekly bus to York.
	The Committee heard that London's success in promoting the greater use of buses had not been replicated across the country, and we heard how, following deregulation, problems arose from the fact that buses chased each other on busy routes, whereas on other routes, bus services were withdrawn because they were not profitable. In some cases, less profitable routes were changed and followed other routes in the same town. We also heard how cuts made at short notice affected people's working lives, their recreation activities and their shopping duties.
	There are a number of problems in encouraging people to use buses, and one of them is access to information. When people come to London from Yorkshire, they use the tube because it is fairly user-friendly. We have more to do in helping people to use the bus services in a strange town—for example, there should be better information at bus stops. More electronic information is being provided to let people know how long it will be before the next bus comes, because people do not want to wait at a bus stop in the rain not knowing when a bus will arrive.
	A move to quality contracts may well answer some of the problems, but the Government need to be careful to ensure that we do not feel the dead hand of regulation instead of enjoying the freedom of competition, which has in many ways led to improvements in certain bus services. It will be a challenge for the Government to address that problem, and it will be interesting to see how things develop in the areas where quality contracts are first introduced.
	It is particularly important to improve the bus services in some of our large towns. Ten years ago, we were told that the answer to our transport problems was better light rail systems. However, in Leeds the supertram has been scrapped, in Liverpoolthe Merseytram scheme is not going ahead, and the Metrolink extensions to Rochdale and Manchester airport have not attracted investment. Buses will have to fill those gaps. We must also consider the role of the traffic commissioners. I agree with the points made by the hon. Member for Sheffield, Attercliffe (Mr. Betts), who is no longer in the Chamber; he was concerned that local decisions might be overruled by unelected traffic commissioners. If traffic commissioners are a benign and positive force in the process, all will be well and good, but it would not be such a good thing if they were considered to be holding back the wishes of local people.
	The UK has a long history of bus and coach manufacturing. Sadly, names such as Leyland and Duple are no longer with us, but we still have bus and coach manufacturing businesses running in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Scarborough. Plaxton was one of the main names in the post-war boom in bus and coach building, and its history dates back 100 years to 1907. It was traditionally a family firm that has been a major employer in Scarborough.
	Frederick William Plaxton opened a joinery workshop in Bar street in Scarborough in 1907. He later moved to Marlborough street and took over premises that were known as Castle works and began building bodywork for private cars and charabancs. During the first world war, Mr. Plaxton took over the former skating rink in Foreshore road to manufacture shell boxes and wooden aircraft parts. In 1936, a large new works was built in Seamer road and soon Plaxton coaches were on the road all over the country. Production was halted at the Seamer road works during the second world war and the site was turned into a munitions factory.
	Bigger and better coaches began to roll out of the works following the end of the war, and Plaxton began to attract big orders from companies like Wallace Arnold. In 1957 FW Plaxton died and was succeeded by his son, who took a big interest in the Plaxton building services side of the business. By 1970, the coachbuilding company had contracts all over the world and was producing 1,000 vehicles a year. Three years later the number had risen to 1,300 a year, accounting for a third of the entire UK bus force, but recession followed a few years later, bringing problems similar to those at ADL in Falkirk. In 1987 Plaxton closed down its Seamer road works and moved its site to Cayton Low road, which had gradually expanded over the previous 20 years.
	Plaxton later became part of the Henlys conglomerate. The Henlys group, which not only manufactured buses but was involved in motor retailing, ran into financial problems towards the end of 2000—problems largely related to its operation manufacturing yellow school buses in the United States of America. It was announced in the summer of 2001 that Plaxton was to shut in August that year with the loss of 700 jobs. That is a large number of jobs in a small place like Scarborough.
	The shock was compounded when it later emerged that many former and current Plaxton workers were told that their pension scheme had been wound up and they would receive only 30 or 35 per cent. of the value of their deferred pensions in the scheme. Plaxton's former owners, Henlys, had gone into liquidation and the pension scheme had an £80 million shortfall. Some workers had transferred from Plaxton pension schemes into the Henlys scheme, and those already drawing a fixed sum Henlys pension would not get the expected increases.
	A £20 million rescue package was put together aimed at saving 200 jobs, but the company that bought the firm, Mayflower, then went into administration and all its staff again faced redundancy. However, the firm's management stepped in to save the firm and completed a buy-out. Since then, the firm has gone from strength to strength and is now almost back to 500 employees. Its chief executive, Brian Davidson, was named 2005 director of the year for manufacturing by the Institute of Directors Yorkshire and Humberside division.
	I have been impressed by the enthusiasm, innovation and dedication shown by the whole team at Plaxton in pulling the market together. Despite heavy pressure in the early days from Spanish manufacturers who were receiving European subsidies, the customers have come back to the product made in Scarborough because of the quality of the fittings and of the product in general. It has led the way in innovation, producing coaches with lifts that can be used by disabled people, and the new Plaxton Primo smaller bus can take 27 seated passengers and 15 standing. It meets all the modern Euro 3 emissions standards.
	I hope that when the Minister comes to Scarborough, possibly to open the new Scarborough integrated transport scheme and to enjoy the pleasure of driving down the still single carriageway A64, she will find time to visit the Plaxton coach works to see how a phoenix has risen from the ashes of the previous disastrous business. I hope that as it celebrates its 100th anniversary, Plaxton will continue to go from strength to strength and bus manufacturing will continue in Scarborough.
	Finally, I should like to say a few words about heritage buses. I am sure that the Minister is aware that many local authorities, including London, are considering imposing punitive levies to prevent heritage vehicles that do not meet modern emission standards from coming into places such as central London. I hope that there will be exemptions for those buses, because it is important that people who travel in the modern, eco-friendly, clean and easy-to-use buses can still enjoy the experiences of yesteryear in travelling in our heritage vehicles, which many enthusiasts still keep on the road.

Gillian Merron: I am delighted to have the opportunity to respond to this very important debate. The future of buses is a subject close to the hearts of my Lincoln constituents, and to the hearts of constituents throughout the country. I shall begin by making some general points, and then deal with the specific issues that Members raised.
	It is the future role that buses will play in our communities, in the lives of our constituents for the better, and in our determination to tackle congestion and to contribute to a cleaner, greener Britain that led this Government to conduct an extensive review of the bus service and bus sector across England. As many Members know, in the past few months I have travelled around the country to see for myself and hear about the real issues that bus passengers, operators and local authorities face. I have been very pleased to see and hear about the real improvements that have been achieved. I congratulate all those involved on their hard work and on the intelligent partnerships that are making a real difference to the lives of people throughout the country.
	On the manufacturing front, I saw at Expo 06 in Birmingham impressive new British-built buses that break new ground—something that we can all celebrate. My hon. Friend the Member for Falkirk (Mr. Joyce) asked about opportunities for industry, and there are indeed tremendous opportunities as bus patronage improves and increases in future. I can tell him that I did indeed see the new hybrid buses from Alexander Dennis, as well as the Wrightbus hybrid double-decker, the Euro 4-engined buses from East Lancs Coachbuilders and—last but not least—the Optare Essex Pullman. That is another example of a bus that is no longer called a bus, but which provides an excellent service.
	Of course, we in central Government also have a strong part to play, which is why we are spending £2.5 billion a year on bus subsidy. Following the introduction of the new national bus concession in 2008, the Government will spend some £1 billion ayear on concessionary travel for older and disabled people.

Chris Mullin: I thank Mr. Speaker for reinstating my little debate after our accident last week.
	I want to raise an issue that has not had the attention it deserves and which is fast becoming a crisis in some parts of the country. Part of the reason for the lack of attention at Government level is, I suspect, because the issue has been perceived as a northern one and thus has not caught the imagination of officials whose view of the world tends to centre around London and the home counties. For the same reason, it has not until recently been high on the agenda of the Local Government Association. Furthermore, to be frank, the local authorities that have taken the greatest hit tend to be those that bent over backwards in the 1980s and early 1990s to protect their employees from the chill winds of Thatcherism. They resisted pressure to outsource and are now saddled with demands that cannot be met and which they would not have had to meet if they had privatised. One cannot help feeling that there is an element of "serves you right" in the initial response when the issue was first raised at national level.
	The good news, however, is that word of the impending disaster has reached Ministers. I hope that when the Minister for Local Government, my hon. Friend the Member for Oldham, East and Saddleworth (Mr. Woolas), replies to the debate he will be able to demonstrate that he and his colleagues are taking the issue seriously; otherwise, I fear the impression will linger that Ministers are still in denial about the magnitude of the problem.
	Before I get down to detail, I want to make one more general point. The situation is an example of compensation culture gone barmy. What started as a laudable and legitimate quest for justice and equality has been perverted by the intervention of a particularly parasitic species of no win, no fee lawyers, in a form of madness that risks damaging the lives of the very workers who were supposed to benefit. What is more, it risks destroying the public services that those pressing claims say they want to protect. Local authorities face the prospect of being sued by one group of employees if they do not implement the agreement and by another if they do. Where unions have reached agreement on behalf of their members they, too, face legal action if they settle for anything less than the maximum. Far from reaching agreement, the no win, no fee lawyers are encouraging employees to take their case to tribunals, flooding the tribunals and enriching themselves.
	I single out for dishonourable mention a solicitor—Mr. Stefan Cross—who has made a speciality of pursuing claims against unions and local authorities without regard for the consequences. He would say that he is merely representing the interests of his clients. I say that ultimately he will damage the interests of his clients, not to mention those of the public at large, and that he is making himself rather rich in the process.
	The sequence of events is approximately as follows. First, protracted negotiations between unions and local government employees, during which I am told that it was argued by some on the union side that the exercise would prove cost-neutral, resulted in the signing of the 1997 single status agreement. The agreement envisaged a harmonisation of terms and conditions for the majority of local government employees, accompanied by a huge job evaluation exercise intended to sweep away injustices and anomalies that had accumulated over decades and replace them with a local government pay structure that reflected equal pay for work of equal value. The agreement was to be implemented by 31 March 2007—an honourable ambition.
	As the deadline approached, an awful truth began to dawn: there would be losers as well as winners. Indeed, there would be more losers than anyone had anticipated, some of whom would lose out very badly indeed. In Sunderland, for example, bin men and road sweepers found themselves facing cuts of up to 20 per cent. in their take-home pay. Nursery nurses found that they would no longer be paid during holidays. The council's hard-working gardeners found that they too were faced with big pay cuts. Needless to say, they were not happy. That gave rise to a new demand—that there should be no losers and that those faced with potentially catastrophic falls in income should be indefinitely protected.
	Reluctantly, and at great expense, the local authority in Sunderland agreed to four years protection. At that point, the lawyers moved in. First, they threatened action against councils who delayed implementation. Then, they took action against unions that had settled for anything less than the maximum. Finally, once protection for the losers had been agreed, they started encouraging those who have already been substantially compensated to sue local authorities, arguing that they should be further compensated in order to maintain parity with those who had been temporarily protected.
	One by one, Stefan Cross and his colleagues are unpicking agreements that everyone thought had been signed and sealed. I am told that the week before last, in Sunderland alone, more than 800 new claims were received, mainly from people who have already pocketed up to £9,000 a head in compensation, plus handsome pay rises, and who are now coming back for more. And so it goes on. No one knows where it will end, or how. As if that situation were not dire enough, somewhere along the line an employment tribunal decreed not merely that injustices should be put right and anomalies rectified, but that those found to have lost out should be compensated six years in arrears—as opposed to the two that had been the norm up to that time—thereby adding another huge sum to the local authority pay bills.
	The response from local authorities has varied. Some, like Sunderland, bit the bullet and sought to implement the agreement as swiftly and fairly as possible. The cost to local taxpayers so far in Sunderland is £15 million and could be tens of millions more if the worst comes to the worst. Sunderland has been advised that, on a worst case scenario, costs could touch £50 million. Some other local authorities have tended to bury their heads in the sand in the hope that it will all go away. One north-east local authority initially adopted a policy of paying out only in response to successful tribunal claims. So far it has shelled out nearly as much as Sunderland on a much smaller number of claims.
	Across the north-east, the total cost of claims could be as high as £300 million, but it is not just a north-east problem—far from it. The west midlands is said to be facing claims of nearly £1 billion, the north-west£740 million, London £123 million, and the south-west £100 million. Nationwide, the bill is estimated to be as high as £2.7 billion, but could eventually be higher. What is to be done? Emphatically, I am not suggesting that the Chancellor be asked to write out a cheque. No sensible person would do that. It has been suggested that the cost could be capitalised and paid off over 40 or 50 years, but that is a very expensive option and, in any case, insufficient to deal with a problem of this magnitude.
	My hon. Friend the Minister has recently announced a modest change to local authority accounting rules that would allow local authorities to defer making provision for equal pay liabilities. That is welcome but, as I am sure that he understands, it does not begin to address the magnitude of the problem. It has also been suggested and I understand recently agreed by Ministers that, at least as far as school caretakers and dinner ladies are concerned, the cost could come from the substantial surpluses that some schools retain. That may help some authorities, but it will inevitably give rise to the charge of unfairness, because some schools have surpluses and others do not. In any case, the majority of those involved are not school employees.
	None of that, however, addresses the real problem, which is that existing agreements are unravelling and the pit is potentially bottomless. We appear to have reached a situation in which, however much we agree with the principle of equal pay for equal work—as we all do—it is apparently impossible to move from an allegedly discriminatory system of pay to a non-discriminatory one. Indeed, I draw my hon. Friend's attention to the comments of Mr. Justice Elias, who presided over the tribunal hearing an equal pay claim involving Redcar and Cleveland borough council. He said:
	"it is important that employers with discriminatory pay structures should be able to manage their way out of them by entering into sensible job evaluation schemes, without thereby opening themselves up to the risk of cascading claims alleging past discrimination."
	In my view, and that of a growing number of local authorities, the only way out of the mess is to change the law to allow for a moratorium on claims for a transitional period, during which agreements reached in good faith would be allowed to take effect without being unpicked by the likes of Mr. Stefan Cross. I understand that the counsel's opinion that has been obtained indicates that that would be feasible. Ministers might also wish to consider whether it would be possible to legislate to reduce the time during which compensation could be paid retrospectively. I am hoping to hear that the Minister and his colleagues have reached similar conclusions and are, even as I speak, trying to identify a suitable legislative vehicle. A failure to do so would risk meltdown.

Phil Woolas: I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Sunderland, South (Mr. Mullin) on securing a debate on one of the most—if not the most—important issues facing local government. Before I outline the actions and policies of the Government, may I start by addressing one of the charges that he made at the beginning of his speech? He suggested that the problem is not recognised by the Government, but I can assure him that that is not the case. It is probably the single most important issue in my in-tray, as it has been for some time, and it is being addressed across the Government. Nor is it, as he rightly said, simply—if "simply" is the right word even in this context—a northern or a north-east problem. It also affects not just local government.
	I concur that this is one of those debates that is of huge importance to local government and its employees. However, I suspect that it will not be reported significantly by the media, perhaps because the subject is too complicated for them. The issue does not get the column inches that it deserves, given its financial importance. I am also grateful that my hon. Friend has given me time to set out the big picture.
	The Equal Pay Act 1970, which came into force in 1975, allowed women to claim for the difference if they could establish that a male comparator doing the same job, or work of equal value, was receiving higher pay. The measure made a significant contribution towards the fall in the gender pay gap, which was 37 per cent. in 1970, but is now at 17 per cent. However, we recognise that pay discrimination is only one of the causes of the pay gap. Of course, the Government are fully committed to equality for all in the work place, as elsewhere, and the principle of equal pay for work of equal value. We have come a long way from the situation when the Equal Pay Act was introduced. At that time, equal pay seemed like a dream. It was not so long before that time that it was a rule in the civil service that women were obliged to resign from work when they got married.
	Local authorities, as employers, had agreed nationally with trade unions a process for establishing pay equality through the single status agreement in 1997 by the time of the 2004 local government pay settlement. The agreement drew together two strands. The first was a demand that manual workers on basic pay should work the same hours as white-collar staff. It had been a long-standing grievance of the trade unions that manual workers worked 39 hours, but white-collar staff worked 37.
	As well as single status, the agreement brought in a movement towards equal pay for equal value. That followed several case law precedents under EU directives and the Equal Pay Act to ensure not only that a women could not be paid less than a man for the same job, but that jobs that were predominantly held by women, but were judged to be of equal value to those predominantly held by men, would be paid on an equal basis, and vice versa. Indeed, I spoke this afternoon to one of the lead negotiators, who now lives and works in Johannesburg in South Africa. He told me that the question asked was why a person pushing a brush should be paid less than a person pushing a pen—or, as he put it, why someone frying a chip should be paid less than someone operating a chip. It took seven years to negotiate and it was believed to be the largest collective bargaining agreement in the UK's history. The key point was that the unions chose to negotiate, not to litigate, in order to allow councils to plan their finances—and good for them.
	To make it real, councils were and are expected to conduct job evaluations across the scope of their organisations and review their pay arrangements so that they match pay to the value of the work undertaken. The diverse spread of occupations in local government and the concentration of women and men in different types of work mean that establishing equal pay for work of equal value is a challenging process for the employers and the individuals concerned.
	I should emphasise, as did my hon. Friend, that central Government were not involved in those negotiations, as the employers are in local government. It is thus very much for individual local authorities, as employers, to ensure that their pay arrangements meet statutory requirements. I understand that the local government employers' organisation has been advising authorities for some time on how to ensure pay equality and has been recommending preparations, including setting aside reserves, which should be made to ensure that the transition can be managed affordably.
	As pay arrangements are the responsibility of individual employers and as they have agreed a framework process for implementing local pay reviews, this is not directly a matter for central Government intervention. I understand my hon. Friend's point when he said that the impression may be given or held that the Government are seeking to wash their hands of this affair—but we are not. We recognise the importance of this issue to the public and hundreds, thousands and millions of employees, let alone the local councils themselves. My point is simply that the Government are neither the employers nor responsible for negotiating this particular set of agreements.
	Local government is not yet in the position where it, as an employer, or its work force or we would like it to be, but we recognise that many authorities are making progress towards pay equality. A third of local authorities had, by mid-2006, implemented local pay reviews based on job evaluation, and we expect that number to have increased since then. The vast majority of the remainder are in the process of negotiating or implementing such reviews.
	I have said—and I repeat—that this is not directly a matter for the central Government. However, I am aware—and, of course, the Government are aware—that the cost and complexity of addressing equal pay issues in local government has, in response to developments in case law, become more challenging in recent years. We are not, contrary to what my hon. Friend suggested in a previous debate, in denial about the impact that this has had on local government. As I say, apart from the financial quantum itself and the future of local government finance policy, this is the most important item in my portfolio. We recognise that it can involve authorities in making some difficult management decisions and I have no doubt that there are some authorities for which the problems seem quite intractable, but that is not a reason to hand the problem to central Government.
	Let me put this issue into the wider context of funding for local government, devolution and pay. All acknowledge that Government central funding for local government has increased substantially and that no Government could be held responsible for a collective agreement to which they were not privy. It is important— especially if one espouses devolution to local government, as we do—that local councils manage their own pay pressures. It is for the Local Government Association and the local government employers' organisation, which conduct the pay negotiations, to consider the impact of equal pay pressures when negotiating local government pay settlements. It is for individual authorities as employers to ensure that pay bill pressures arising from work force changes or pay drift are carefully managed.
	Having established the problem facing local government within its wider context, I will move on quickly to the recent dialogue in which we have looked at how we can work together on this issue. Following recent judgments by employment tribunals, the LGA and others have recently made representations to the Government about the cost of back pay in respect of equal pay, and they have proposed a number of legal and financial solutions. Of course I have met the LGA and trade unions to hear at first hand about those issues.
	The Government are currently considering a range of options that increase authorities' flexibility to manage their equal pay pressures. It is important, however, that we do not slow down the process of implementing equal pay. One of the proposals made by the LGA is to increase the capitalisation limit, which constrains local authorities' ability to borrow to fund one-off back payments. Of course, we need to protect the Chancellor's golden rule that long-term borrowing should be used only to finance capital expenditure. In fact, that limit was raised to £236 million, including£6 million brought forward from 2005-06, for the current financial year. Applications for capitalisation from local authorities have been considered alongside competing bids, and on 31 January the formal capitalisation directions were issued.
	As I announced, and as my hon. Friend mentioned, in my recent written answer to his parliamentary question—I commend him for being the hon. Member who has put this issue on the agenda—I noted that we have recently consulted on an amendment to the capital finance regulations. Although not solving the problem, that change would help to allow local authorities greater flexibility in managing their financial pressures relating to equal pay. Under the current accounting rules, authorities are obliged to make financial provision for anticipated liabilities, as soon as they can be reliably estimated, rather than during the year in which they must be paid. The amendment would exempt equal pay back pay from that accounting rule for a limited period and allow authorities that wished to take advantage of that relaxation greater flexibility in managing their financial liabilities.

Phil Woolas: As ever, my hon. Friend asks the pertinent question. The timetable is dictated by when the opinion is made available to us. I understand that the employment tribunal appeal is to be heard on12 February, and it could be some time before the result of the appeal is known. Any timetable that might involve a legislative route would be dependent on the outcome of the appeal. That is why I say that we await the outcome of the appeal with great anticipation. The timetable, on which my hon. Friend pushes me, is dictated by that decision, and by the wider review of the legal opinion. As I say, although we have not been inactive on the matter, it is not clear at the moment whether legislative routes would attain the objective that we agree is desirable.
	The important point to emphasise and to record in  Hansard is that the Government do not rule out a legislative route, because we understand the point that my hon. Friend makes so powerfully about the unintended impacts of the collective bargaining agreement, which has been detrimental to some. We recognise the importance of the issue, and that the problem is not confined to one region. We are prepared to legislate if that is desirable, both in terms of the protection of collective agreements and in itself.
	The difference between equal pay and equal pay for equal value has to be recognised. The Government believe that it would be desirable to achieve equal pay for equal value in incremental steps, and that is inherent to the idea of collective bargaining. That approach would protect employees across the piece, and allow us to move towards ensuring a fairer, equally paid work force. It would be wrong to say that there are simple answers, and my hon. Friend acknowledged that. We recognise that the matter is a significant problem facing local government and its employees.
	 Question put and agreed to.
	 Adjourned accordingly at twenty-eight minutes past Six o'clock.